No two of the tiny blue shadows the same shape or size.

The rest of her is goosedowned, quilted and insulated,

her hair tucked under a knitted hat,

but never again

warm enough.

Standing center stage, the Baroness Frostbite says, “We should forgive God . . .”

For making us too short. Fat. Poor.

We should forgive God our baldness.

Our cystic fibrosis. Our juvenile leukemia.

We should forgive God's indifference, His leaving us behind:

Us, God's forgotten Science Fair project, left to grow mold.

God's goldfish, ignored until we're forced to eat our own shit off the bottom.

Her hands inside mittens, the Baroness points to her face, saying, “People . . .”

They assume she was once gorgeously beautiful.

Because now she looks so—bad.

People, they need some sense of justice. A balancing act.

They assume cancer, her own fault, something she deserved.

A disaster she made happen herself.

So she tells them, “Floss. For God's sake, floss before bed every night.”

And every night the Baroness, she forgives other people.

She forgives herself.

And she forgives God for those disasters that just seem to

happen.

Hot Potting

A Story by the Baroness Frostbite

“Come February nights,” Miss Leroy used to say, “and every drunk driver was a blessing.”

Every couple looking for a second honeymoon to patch up their marriage. People falling asleep at the steering wheel. Anybody who pulled off the highway for a drink, they were somebody Miss Leroy could maybe talk into renting a room. It was half her business, talking. To keep people buying another next drink, and another, until they had to stay.

Sometimes, sure, you're trapped. Other times, Miss Leroy would say, you just sit down for what turns out to be the rest of your life.

Rooms there at the Lodge, most people, they expect better. The iron bed frames teeter, the rails and footboards worn where they notch together. The nuts and bolts, loose. Upstairs, every mattress is lumpy as foothills, and the pillows are flat. The sheets are clean, but the well water up here, it's hard. You wash anything in this water, and the fabric feels sandpaper-rough with minerals and smells of sulfur.

The final insult is, you have to share a bathroom down the hall. Most folks don't travel with a bathrobe, and this means getting dressed just to take a leak. In the morning, you wake up to a stinking sulfur bath in a white-cold cast-iron claw-foot tub.

It's a pleasure for her to herd these February strangers toward the cliff. First, she shuts off the music. A full hour before she even starts talking, she turns down the volume, a notch every ten minutes, until Glen Campbell is gone. After traffic turns to nothing going by on the road outside, she turns down the heat. One by one, she pulls the string that snaps off each neon beer sign in the window. If there's been a fire in the fireplace, Miss Leroy will let it burn out.

All this time, she's herding, asking what plans these people have. February on the White River, there's less than nothing to do. Snowshoe, maybe. Cross-country ski, if you bring your own. Miss Leroy lets some guest bring up the idea. Everybody gets around to this same suggestion.

And if they don't, then she brings up the notion of hot potting.

Her stations of the cross. She walks her audience through the road map of her story. First she shows herself, how she looked most of her life ago, twenty years old and out of college for the summer, car camping up the White River, begging for a summer job, what back then was the dream job: tending bar here at the Lodge.

It's hard to imagine Miss Leroy skinny. Her skinny with white teeth, before her gums started to pull back. Before the way they look now, the brown root of each tooth exposed, the way carrots will crowd each other out of the ground if you plant the seed too close together. It's hard to imagine her voting Democrat. Even liking other people. Miss Leroy without the dark shadow of hair across her top lip. It's hard to imagine college boys waiting an hour in line to fuck her.

It makes her seem honest, saying something funny and sad like that, about herself.

It makes people listen.

If you hugged her now, Miss Leroy says, all you'd feel is the pointy wire of her bra.

Hot potting, she says, is, you get a gang of kids together and hike up the fault side of the White River. You pack in your own beer and whiskey and find a hot-springs pool. Most pools stand between 150 and 200 degrees, year-round. Up at this elevation, water boils at 198 degrees Fahrenheit. Even in winter, at the bottom of a deep icy pit, the side of snowdrifts sloping into them, these pools are hot enough to boil you alive.

No, the danger wasn't bears, not here. You wouldn't see wolves or coyote or bobcat. Downriver, yes, just one click away on your odometer, just one radio song down the highway, the motels had to chain their garbage cans shut. Down there, the snow was busy with paw prints. The night was noisy with packs howling at the moon. But here, the snow was smooth. Even the full moon was quiet.

Upriver from the Lodge, all you had to worry about was being scalded to death. City kids, dropped out of college, some stay around a couple years. Some way, they pass down the okay about which pools are safe and where to find them. Where not to walk, there's only a thin crust of calcium or limestone sinter that looks like bedrock but will drop you through to deep-fry in a hidden thermal vent.

The scare stories, they pass along also. A hundred years back, a Mrs. Lester Bannock, here visiting from Crystal Falls, Pennsylvania, she stopped to wipe the steam from her smoked glasses. The breeze shifted, blowing hot steam in her eyes. One wrong step, and she was off the path. Another wrong step, and she lost her balance, landing backward, sitting in water scalding hot. Trying to stand, she pitched forward, landing facedown in the water. Screaming, she was hauled out by strangers.

The sheriff who raced her into town, he requisitioned every drop of olive oil from the kitchen at the Lodge. Coated in oil and wrapped in clean sheets, she died in a hospital, still screaming, three days later.

Recent as three summers ago, a kid from Pinson City, Wyoming, he parked his pickup truck and out jumped his German shepherd. The dog splashed dead center, jumping into a pool, and yelped itself to death mid–dog paddle. The tourists chewing their knuckles, they told the kid, don't, but he dove in.

He surfaced just once, his eyes boiled white and staring. Rolling around blind. No one could touch him long enough to grab hold, and then he was gone.

The rest of that year, they dipped him out with nets, the way you'd clean leaves and dead bugs out of a swimming pool. The way you'd skim the fat off a pot of stew.

At the Lodge bar, Miss Leroy would pause to let people see this a moment in their heads. The bits of him left all summer skittering around in the hot water, a batch of fritters spitting to a light brown.

Miss Leroy would smoke her cigarette.

Then, like this is something she's just remembered, she'd say, “Olson Read.” And she'd laugh. Like this is something she doesn't think about part of every minute, every hour she's awake, Miss Leroy will say, “You should've met Olson Read.”

Big, fat, virtuous, sin-free Olson Read.

Olson was a cook at the Lodge, fat and pale white, his lips too big, blown up with blood and squirming red as sushi against the sticky-rice-white skin of his face. He watched those hot pools. The way he'd kneel beside them all day, watching it, the bubbling brown froth, hot as acid.